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Sony Computer Entertainment
Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. (Japanese: 株式会社ソニー・コンピュータエンタテインメント) is a major video game company specializing in a variety of areas in the video game industry, and is a wholly owned subsidiary and part of the Consumer Products & Services Group of Sony. The company was established on November 16, 1993 in Tokyo, Japan, prior to the launch of the original PlayStation video game system. Sony Computer Entertainment handles the research & development, production, and sales of both hardware and software for the PlayStation line of handheld and home console video game systems. It is also a developer and publisher of video game titles and is composed of several subsidiaries covering the company's biggest markets: North America, Europe and Asia. History The North American operations, Sony Computer Entertainment of America, were established in May 1994 as a division of Sony Electronic Publishing.[1] They were located in Foster City and headed by Steve Race. In the months prior to the release of PlayStation in Western markets, the operations were restructured: All videogame marketing from Sony Imagesoft was folded into SCEA in July 1995, with most affected employees transferred from Santa Monica to Foster City.[2] On August 7, 1995, Steve Race unexpectedly resigned and was named CEO of Spectrum HoloByte three days later.[2] He was replaced by Sony Electronics veteran Martin Homlish.[2] As part of a worldwide restructuring at the beginning of 1997, Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. (currently Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC), headquartered in Foster City was reestablished as a wholly owned subsidiary of SCEI.[3] On July 1, 2002 Chairman of SCE, Shigeo Maruyama, was replaced by Tamotsu Iba as Chairman. Jack Tretton and Phil Harrison were also promoted to Senior Vice President of SCE.[4] On September 14, 2005, SCE formed Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios (SCE WWS),[5] a single internal entity overseeing all wholly owned development studios within SCE. It is responsible for the creative and strategic direction of development and production of all computer entertainment software by all SCE-owned studios, all of which is produced exclusively for the PlayStation family of consoles. Shuhei Yoshida was named as President of SCE WWS on May 16, 2008,[6] replacing Kazuo Hirai, who was serving interim after inaugural SCE WWS President Phil Harrison left the company in early 2008.[7] On November 30, 2006 President of SCE Ken Kutaragi was appointed as Chairman of SCE while Kazuo Hirai, President of SCEA was promoted to President of SCE.[8] On April 26, 2007 Ken Kutaragi resigned from his position as Chairman of SCE and Group CEO passing on his duties to President of SCE, Kazuo Hirai.[9] On April 15, 2009 David Reeves, President and CEO of SCE Europe, announced that he would be resigning from his post. He had joined the company in 1995 and was appointed as Chairman of SCEE in 2003 and President in 2005.[10] His role of President and CEO of SCEE would be taken over by Andrew House who joined Sony Corporation in 1990.[11] On December 8, 2005, video game developer Guerrilla Games, developers of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killzone_(series) Killzone series], was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment as part of its SCE WWS.[12] On January 24, 2006 video game developer Zipper Interactive, developers of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCOM_(series) SOCOM series], was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment as part of its SCE WWS.[13] On September 20, 2007 video game developers Evolution Studios and Bigbig Studios, developers of the MotorStorm series, were acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment as part of its SCE WWS.[14] On April 1, 2010 Sony Computer Entertainment was restructured to bring together Sony's mobile electronics and personal computers divisions. The main Japanese division of SCE was temporarily renamed to "SNE Platform Inc." (SNEP) on April 1, 2010 and split into two division focusing on different aspects namely "Sony Computer Entertainment Inc." consisting of a 1,300 employees which focus on the console business, and the network service business consisting of 60 to 70 employees. The network service business of SCE was absorbed into Sony Corp's Network Products & Service Group (NPSG) which has already been headed by Kazuo Hirai since April 2009. The original Sony Computer Entertainment was then dissolved after the restructure.[15][16][17] The North American and European branches of Sony Computer Entertainment was affected by the restructure and will remain as SCEA and SCEE. Sony Computer Entertainment CEO and Sony Corporation EVP, Kazuo Hirai, is leading both departments.[18] On March 2, 2010 video game developer Media Molecule, developers of the PlayStation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment as part of its SCE WWS.[19] As of August 23, 2010, the headquarters of the company moved from Minami-Aoyama to the Sony City (Sony Corporation's headquarters) in Kōnan, Minato, Tokyo.[20] On April 20, 2011, Sony Computer Entertainment was the victim of an attack on its PlayStation Network system, which also affected its online division, Sony Online Entertainment. On August 1, 2011, video game developer Sucker Punch Productions, developers of the Sly Cooper series and Infamous series, was also acquired.[21] On June 25, 2012, Kazuo Hirai retired as chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment, however, he remains on the board of directors.[22] On July 2, 2012, Sony Computer Entertainment acquired Gaikai, a cloud-based gaming service.[23] On January 10, 2013, Sony renamed SCE Cambridge Studio to Guerrilla Cambridge which will act as a sister studio to Guerrilla Games.[24] Hardware Main article: PlayStation Sony Computer Entertainment produces the PlayStation family of video game hardware consisting of consoles and handhelds. Sony's first wide home console release, the PlayStation (codenamed PSX during development, currently PSone), was initially designed to be a CD-ROM drive add-on for Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (a.k.a. Super Famicom in Japan) video game console, in response to Sega's Mega-CD. When the prospect of releasing the system as an add-on dissolved, Sony redesigned the machine into a stand alone unit. The PlayStation was released in Japan on December 3, 1994 and later in North America on September 9, 1995. Currently the highest selling home console of all time, SCE's second home console, the PlayStation 2 (PS2 or PSX2) was released in Japan on March 4, 2000, and later in North America and Europe in October and November 2000, respectively. The PS2 is powered by a proprietary central processing unit, the Emotion Engine, and was the first video game console to have DVD playback functionality included out of the box. Initially, the system was criticized for its complex development environment, due mainly to the proprietary hardware included. However, despite these complaints, the PlayStation 2 received widespread support from third party developers throughout its lifespan on the market. Today it has sold up to 150 million units world wide. The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is SCE's first foray into the small handheld console market, which was and to this date still is dominated by Nintendo. Its development was first announced during SCE's E3 conference in 2003, and it was officially unveiled during their E3 conference on May 11, 2004. The system was released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005 and in Europe and Australia on September 1, 2005. The console has since seen two major redesigns, with new features including a smaller size, more internal memory, a better quality LCD screen and a lighter weight. A new design, the PSP Go, was released on October 1, 2009 for North America and Europe and on November 1, 2009 for Japan. It has a 3.8" LCD which slides up to reveal the main controls. The PSP Go is 45% lighter and 56% smaller than the original PSP and does not support UMD. The device does support Bluetooth and will be completely digital meaning all media must be downloaded or transferred to the device which has 16 GB of internal flash memory. The PlayStation 3 (PS3) was launched in November 2006. It utilizes a unique processing architecture, the Cell microprocessor, a proprietary technology developed by Sony in conjunction with Toshiba and IBM. The graphics processing unit, the RSX 'Reality Synthesizer', was co-developed by Nvidia and Sony. Several variations of the PS3 have been released, each with slight hardware and software differences, each denoted by the varying size of the included hard disk drive. The PlayStation Vita. It is the successor to the PlayStation Portable as part of the PlayStation brand of gaming devices. It was released in Japan and parts of Asia on December 17, 2011[25] and in Europe, Australia and North America on February 22, 2012.[26][27] Internally, the Vita features a 4 core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a 4 core SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit, as well as LiveArea software as its main user interface, which succeeds the XrossMediaBar.[28][29] The PlayStation 4 (PS4) was announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3[30] and will be launched first North America on November 15th 2013.[31]